Briefly: Frontier, the world’s strongest supercomputer, is on-line however nonetheless removed from operational. Its director has confirmed experiences that it’s experiencing a system failure each few hours, however insists that is par for the course.
Frontier is in a category of its personal. It has 9,408 HPE Cray EX235a nodes, every powered by an AMD Trento 7A53 Epyc 64-core CPU geared up with 512 GB of DDR4, and 4 AMD Intuition MI250X GPUs / accelerators every geared up with 128 GB of HBM2e. Summed, the system has 602,112 CPU cores and eight,138,240 GPU cores in complete, and 4.6 PB of each DDR4 and HBM2e.
In Might, Frontier joined the TOP500 as the primary supercomputer to interrupt the exascale barrier after it accomplished the HPL benchmark with a rating of 1.102 ExaFlops/s. Since then, the Oak Ridge Nationwide Laboratory in Tennessee, which manages the supercomputer, has been readying it for scientific analysis scheduled to begin in January.
Nevertheless, there have been experiences that the launch of Frontier might be waylaid by extreme {hardware} failures. Looking for solutions, Inside HPC organized an interview with the Program Director at Oak Ridge, Justin Whitt. Within the interview, he confirmed Frontier was experiencing every day system failures however asserted that was inevitable in such a big system.
“Imply time between failure on a system this measurement is hours, it is not days,” he stated. “So you might want to ensure you perceive what these failures are and that there is no patterns to these failures that you might want to be involved with.” Whitt added that going a day and not using a failure “could be excellent.”
“Our purpose remains to be hours.”
There have been rumors that the {hardware} issues have been being attributable to the brand new AMD Intuition MI250X, however Whitt refuted them. The MI250X is AMD’s strongest GPU/accelerator, and it solely sells it to pick out companions. It has 220 CUs containing 14,080 cores clocked at 1700 MHz in a 500 W bundle.
“The problems span quite a lot of totally different classes, the GPUs are only one,” Whitt remarked. “It has been a fairly good unfold amongst widespread culprits of elements failures which were an enormous a part of it. I do not suppose that at this level that we have now quite a lot of concern over the AMD merchandise,” he added.
“We’re coping with quite a lot of the early-life type of issues we have seen with different machines that we have deployed, so it is nothing too out of the strange.”
Whitt conceded that the unprecedented scale of Frontier had made fantastic tuning it “slightly bit more durable” however stated they have been nonetheless following the schedule set again in 2018-19 regardless of delays attributable to the pandemic.
Head over to Inside HPC to learn the complete interview.
